‘The Founder’s Curse: Monroe’s Struggle Against Political Parties’
By Brook Poston
Johns Hopkins University Press, 248 pages

The fifth president of the United States, James Monroe, was part of the so-called Virginia Dynasty and the last Founding Father to serve in the highest office in the land. Famous for the Monroe Doctrine, re-elected in 1820 with only one dissenting ballot in the Electoral College, and a celebrated leader who presided over the “era of good feeling,” Monroe has nonetheless never been ranked as a great president.

The reasons for Monroe’s relegation to the second tier of presidents has partly to do with how he has been compared to his predecessors: his mentor, Thomas Jefferson; a sometime rival and sometime collaborator, James Madison; and, of course, George Washington. They overshadow the accomplishments of Monroe, who seemed pedestrian in comparison, a hard worker with no intellect or wit. He was disparaged by contemporaries such as the brilliant Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, who were put out with Monroe’s bland desire to reach consensus on whatever policy he promoted.

Nonetheless, Brook Poston accords Monroe the honor of possessing a shrewdly employed political intelligence aimed at healing the wounding divide between Federalists and Republicans. In the process of forging a reconciliation between bitter opponents, he also sought to eliminate the contentious two-party system. Monroe was not without his passions, deftly maneuvering out of a duel with the pugnacious Hamilton, but he treated other hotheads like Andrew Jackson with tempered respect.

Monroe succeeded as a soldier in the Continental Army, served as a senator and then as Washington’s ambassador to France, governor of Virginia, special envoy negotiating the Louisiana Purchase, and President Madison’s secretary of state. Monroe’s prowess is reflected in his nearly unanimous re-election as president in 1820, and in the conversion of Federalists like John Quincy Adams to the Republican cause. While Jefferson said in his conciliatory first inaugural that his contemporaries were all Federalists and all Republicans, it was Monroe who actually knew how to make that sentiment a reality.

Aligned with Monroe’s belief in a triumphant Republican Party was his warning to European powers against interference in the South American struggle for liberation. While his secretary of state, Adams, doubted that postcolonial South America would become democratic, Monroe, like Jefferson, believed in the spread of republicanism world wide.

Monroe erred in his belief that he could abolish the contentious two-party system forever, and that his “era of good feeling,” in which Americans of all political persuasions hailed his tour of the United States and showed up to cheer him, could be the perpetual province of a president. 

So what happened in 1825, when Monroe left office? Why was his successor, Adams, unable to sustain political comity? Monroe understood that as soon as Adams, who lacked Monroe’s consensus-building talent, offered Henry Clay the secretary of state position in the new administration, the followers of Andrew Jackson, who won a plurality in the Electoral College, would denounce the “corrupt bargain” that rewarded Clay for shifting enough electoral votes to make Adams the winner.

The denouement of the Adams victory led to resumption of the two-party system that Monroe had worked so hard to destroy. Mr. Poston notes that not enough credit has been given to the circumspect Monroe, who behind the scenes advised Adams not to appoint Clay, thus undoing Monroe’s largely successful effort to mollify Jackson and his aggressive supporters. 

Perhaps the most important contribution of Mr. Poston’s book, though, is his belief that Monroe was mistaken that contending parties were the problem. Mr. Poston points out that until recently a strong party system — much stronger than the Federalist and Republican parties between the 1790s and the 1820s — actually was a boon to the republic. Parties with strong infrastructures vetted candidates ensured, more or less, a continuity of competence that endured no matter how divisive elections became. Nowadays, Mr. Poston contends, the real threat is a weak two-party system, allowing the rise of candidates who are not the products of a properly administered process of selection.

In the end, however, quite aside from who was right about the trajectory of history, what remains of Monroe’s legacy is his character, exemplified in a patience that to others could seem plodding or even pusillanimous. Yet in Mr Poston’s book that becomes the panoply of supple political praxis that few presidents have been able to perfect.

Mr. Rollyson’s work in progress is “Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History.”